DUTY OF A TEACHER

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 61, 15 March 1924, Page 9

DUTY OF A TEACHER

DEAN iNGE ON EDUCATION

TO MAKE. HIMSKLF UNNECESSARY.

(fED.U OUR OWJi COIIItKSI-O.IDL.NT.)

LONDON, Bth January. As js the custom on the second day of the conference of the Educational Associations now in progress at the Guildhall the mem hers attended the Church of St. Mary. Abchureh before proceeding to their business. The speaker on this occasion was the Dean of St. Paul's. ' Dean Inge, in his sermon, said that the whole object of a good teacher was to make himself unnecessary. He unlocked the outer gate of the treasure house of knowledge; he imbued his .pupils with a lively faith in the riches withm, and with a keen desire to make them his own. And then he put the bunch of keys in his pupils' hands and bade them go in and explore for themselves. It was not the quantity of know- ; ledge imparted that tested the teacher's litness. It was the intellectual love that he had nurtured, the spiritual longings ■he had fostered. In the higher walks of education the greatest schoolmasters that this country produced in the last century were men who possessed this gift in a pro-eminent degree. They sometimes had nearly every other fault a schoolmaster could have.' Some were bad disciplinarians, very hot-tempered,, and unmethodical, but they kindled enthusiasm, and their pupils many oj whom became distinguished, blessed their memory. ' If our higher education had often tho opposite result, if it had left the pupil with a, positive disrelish for knowledge, and determined never again to trouble himself with studies,, which seemed to him to lie outside the. warm and living realities among which he moved, and which were associated in his mind only with irksome drudgery and deadly dulness, the fault had been mainly in tho subjects apd methods of our education, and not with the teacher or the taught. A BLUNDER RECTIFIED. Instead of beginning in our own time and our own country, and then illuminating and expanding it by an ever-wid-ening vista of history, science, literature, and philosophy, we had hurried away, the young mind into the remote and shadowy past, a world that.did not resemble his own and 'had no point of contact with; his thoughts, and so we had often turned what should be natural curiosity into the dreary task-work of a reluctant memory. Happily this ■blunder had now been* rectified iii most of our schools, and it was being discovered that the remedy did not necessarily involve the abandonment of classical studies. Our religious leaching had been even more timid and unintelligent than our secondary secular teaching. We had solemnly taught our children how the Tabernacle was built, who were the kings, and so forth, and we had thought ■we were teaching religion. There were simple things that could bo taught to children, but they could not be put into a syllabus. If they were taught in school at all there ivas certainly no difficulty in teaching them to a mixed class of church people arid Nonconformists, but the really important thing was that the. teachm- should believe ' them himself, that the teachers should be religious, earnest-minded men and women. Religion* was cauyht, not taught. A FINISHED LITTLE BIGOt! '' There was another theory of religious education, not open to the charge of being impracticable. They mijrht teach.' the child that those only would be saved who belonged to a> particular Communion. They might teach him that God would not forgive his sins unless a priest had given him absolution; they might teach him that a concrete system of doctrine hn.d been'founded by an infallibJo Church, and that he must believe exactly what the accredited officers of that Church told him, and so forth. By means of such a system they might turn a child of twelve into ;t perfect and finished little bigot, and perhaps render him immune from all other influences for tho rest of his. life. That method inflicted a deadly injury. They had no right to take a mind, incompetent, and .helpless, and force it into their own little groove. Thai whole system showed a grievous want of faith. It was assumed that unless we influenced the immature intelligence we should appeal in vain to the grown man and woman. There was no reason for this mistrust. They need not be afraid to stand or fall by their appeal to the. free and unbiased' mind. They could turn a child into a -machine-made pro- | duct at twelve, but such methods were j beat left to the Communist Sunday Schools. But if the influence of the religious lesson was far less than was often supposed, the responsibility of the parent aud teacher was much greater. Character was moulded by character.